Certify'em News
This page features news and updates about Certify'em. The latest news will always appear at the top. Feel free to reference this page in your own blogs or publications. #certifyem.
New Email Quotas, QR Codes, and Price Increases - July 2, 2022
You can now send more emails per day with paid plans, and include a QR code in your certificate to verify authenticity. Prices will be increasing starting August 6, 2022. Save money by purchasing a yearly subscription at the current price before the new price takes effect.
See this article for detailed information about this change.
Improved Templates, Pay in Rupees - October 2021
Many More Certificate Templates to Choose From:
Certify'em now includes many new, professionally designed certificate templates for your use! The new template selector allows you to easily preview all of these wonderful designs. And if you loved the classic templates, don't worry - those are still included. To launch the template selector, just click the "Change Template" link in the Certify'em controls.
Use a Personal Copy of an Included Template:
You can now create a personal copy of any included certificate template. This allows you to use the included template as starting point so that you don't need to create a template from scratch. The personal copy (a Google Slides file) will be placed in your Google Drive, allowing for easy editing. For example, you can add or remove text, insert your organization's logo, or add someone's signature. As before, you're still able to specify a template of your own design if none of the included ones meets your needs.
Quickly Create a New Certificate Template:
Many people prefer to create their own certificate template from scratch, but this requires several steps (go to Google Drive, create the file, go back to Certify'em, select the new file). Now you can do this in a single step using the new template selector! Just choose the "Create My Own" template. This will create a new Google Slides file in your Google Drive, and save it as your current template. For convenience, the (mostly) blank Slides file is pre-filled with instructions and commonly used merge tags.
New Payment Method for Users in India (Possible Need to Repurchase):
For users in India, it is now possible to purchase plans in Rupees. This is to comply with recent changes to banking laws in India that may cause some purchases in foreign currencies (i.e. USD) to be declined. These changes may also cause existing subscriptions to be canceled due to failed payments, so you may need to repurchase your subscription in Rupees if you are notified that your subscription was canceled. See the "Need to Purchase in Indian Rupees?" links on the Certify'em purchase pages.
User Survey:
We'd like to hear from you about how you use Certify'em! Please consider filling out our new survey.
Introducing Certify'em Gold and Platinum - July 27, 2020
Certify'em has been a completely free tool since 2017. Since then it has grown in use significantly, now sending hundreds-of-thousands of certificates daily, with over 24 million certificates sent in total. To help offset the costs of maintaining such a popular tool, I am introducing paid subscriptions to Certify'em, and making a small change to the existing, free version.
See this article for detailed information about this change. Starting October 26, the free version will add an attribution label to each certificate sent. You may need to update your certificate template(s) before then.
New Updates For Heavy Users - May 17, 2020
COVID-19 has affected education in many ways, and I've seen some of that reflected in an increased growth in the use of Certify'em. In April 2020 alone, Certify'em sent out over 3.1 million certificates, which was 30x above typical levels. And although May is not yet over, Certify'em is on-track to send out close to 7 million certificates by the end of the month. Wow! I feel fortunate to be able to help out teachers and students during this time, and am also excited to announce two new features that should help them more:
Resend Certificates: The new Resend Certificates feature in Certify'em allows instructors to review the past 2 weeks of Google Form responses and reprocess them. This is useful if a student claims they never received a certificate, and you want to resend it without the student needing to re-take the exam. It can also be useful if certification was turned OFF in your exam, but the Google Form/Quiz was allowed to continue accepting responses in the meantime. To try it, just select "Resend Certificates" from the main Certify'em menu and click the "Reprocess" button next to any entry. After reprocessing completes, a new entry will be written to the Certificate Records sheet. And if the response received a passing score, a new certificate (with new certificate ID) will be sent. You can reprocess up to 10 responses at the same time.
See Email Quota: With many teachers now sending large numbers of certificates, it's important they have a way to keep track of how many more emails they can to send until hitting their daily quota. This information is now surfaced in the main Certify'em menu. Just look for the word "Quota". The email quota shown there will update each time you re-open the main menu, as well as every 5 minutes automatically.
If you are new to Certify'em due to online education requirements, or are sending many, many certificates, I hope these updates will be helpful!
Send Certificates to Bcc Address - August 9, 2019
Want to have copies of certificates stored in an additional location? Or just notify someone else in your organization when someone passes an exam? Then use the new "Certificate Bcc" field in the Certify'em Advanced Options. When filled-in, all certificate emails sent to those who pass an exam will be Bcc'd to the address you specify. Exam-takers will not see this Bcc'd address when viewing the email that contains their certificate.
Note that these Bcc emails will count against your daily email quota set by Google.
More Ways to Email - October 15, 2018
There are two new ways to customize and personalize the emails you send exam-takers!
(1) Send Email on Attempt: Now you can send an email when someone attempts, but does not pass your exam. The option to do this is called "Send email on attempt", and can be found in the Advanced Options. If checked, an email will be sent to the exam taker if they don't pass your exam. You can also set your own custom subject and body for the email. Note that as with certificate emails, attempt emails will count against your daily email quota set by Google.
(2) Merge Tags in Subject and Body: If using your own custom subject and email body (for certificate and/or attempt emails), you can now use merge tags to make them more personalized. These are the same merge tags available in custom certificates. For example:
Subject: Thanks for your submission to {{title}}
Email Body: Sorry {{full name}}, you did not pass the exam: {{title}}. Your score: {{percent}}. Passing score: {{passing percent}}.
New Advanced Options - August 6, 2018
Advanced Options allow you to further customize your exam and exam-taker's experience. Now you can personalize the email sent to those who pass your exam, and change the message they see upon submission. You can also choose whether to send certificates as an image (instead of PDF), and to share the certificate via Google Drive instead of email. The latter is helpful in schools where students have no access to their email account.
To access advanced options, click the "Advanced" link at the bottom of the Certify'em pop-up menu. For detailed instructions on each option, see the Help Page on Advanced Options.
Also new in this version is a change to certificate ID's, which now have a 6 letter code prepended to them that is unique to your exam. For example:
Old ID's: CE000014, CE000015
New ID's: XFD4V5-CE000014, XFD4V5-CE000015
Here XFD4V5 is a code unique to your exam, and which will be present in all future certificate IDs generated for that exam. Each exam will have it's own unique code. This enables easier searching for certificate IDs when you have many exams setup.
